2018-07-28

A solution to US policing

America has a very serious problem with bad policemen. It's unique in the
Western world. Other industrialised countries just don't have the same
problem. It's not as though other nations are perfect, and I say this because
someone will think I'm saying that. And I'll also say that the US has
some very good police officers and police departments.

It's the structure of US policing that is the problem. You
have police and a court system at all three levels of government -
federal, state and local/municipal. Not to mention university and
college law enforcement (in Australia, where I come from, universities
employ security guards, but policing in educational institutions are
done by the state police as well)
Other countries just don't have this. In the UK, the police are
overseen by a single government. They are broken up into various metro
areas but the quality of training and standard of behaviour is uniform
throughout the entire UK.

In Australia, the "police" are run by the state governments. We have a
few federal agencies to help with law enforcement, but no local
government has its own court system or police officers.

The US system is so bad because of local police. Because
each local government area (cities, counties, parishes, towns etc) has
its own police, it can only afford what it can get in local taxes. Thus
poorer areas have low quality police and rich areas have high quality
police... and the rich areas are corrupted by the local wealth.
The solution would be to have

A Federally funded and trained police force,

Controlled by the State governments,

Appointed to Local areas by their consent.

This would free up the costs of law enforcement for local and state
governments by diverting it to the federal government. It would allow
states a measure of control for states rights purposes, and allow local
areas to decide whether or not they want their own cops or whether they
want to save money by letting the states run their law enforcement.
Note: This is not a perfect solution. Corruption and
incompetence will not be completely erased in this system. But it will
definitely make things better. And I'm annoyed that I have to say this
because idiots will come out and say "but there's police problems in UK
and Australia too" and link to wikipedia articles.